


(It's a) Departure

by xxx_mlggamer_xxx



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Like Just Nonlinear Enough to be a Little Annoying, Pietro Maximoff Lives, Semi-linear, could be read as romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-07
Updated: 2018-03-07
Packaged: 2019-03-28 04:48:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13896600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xxx_mlggamer_xxx/pseuds/xxx_mlggamer_xxx
Summary: Pietro remembers, very distinctly, dying. The pain, the look on Barton's face, his sister's screaming in his mind.So when he wakes up to smiling faces and warm sun, he's bound to jump to some conclusions.ORThe story of Pietro in Wakanda. How he got better, how he got worse, and how he got his sister back.





	(It's a) Departure

His last thought was for Wanda.

He looked past the carnage of the streets he once bitterly called his home. The screams of the evacuating public, the hail of bullets, the rattling explosions faded into white noise as he spotted Barton, that infuriating archer who had inspired his sister where he failed, and the child in his arms.

The boy couldn’t have been older than how old they were – he and Wanda - when they peered out from under their bed and read words in a language they did not yet understand: “Stark.” The boy was probably the same age they had been when they waited for rescue, clutching to each other and to the memory of their parents that would eventually fade into the single static photo that Pietro knew was in his locker on the jet.

Pietro wondered if Barton had kids. Pietro wondered if Barton had a son or a daughter waiting and hoping that Stark would not kill their daddy, too.

He was moving before even he could comprehend it.

The world slowed around him as he slipped into silver, and he didn’t think about it, he just did. Wanda was right whenever she would tease him about rushing into things. He was right when he shot back that he didn’t need a brain so long as he had her.

He pushed. He saw Barton duck around the child, unaware of his own safety. He felt every bullet in slow-motion.

He might have been the one with speed, but Wanda’s brain moved faster than he ever could. She screamed in his mind, his pain becoming her pain and ricocheting back at him. He felt her scarlet, the ever-present comfort of home, in his head as his body went numb. As Barton turned slowly to look at him, horror dawning on his face, Pietro felt the scarlet reach out to him, grab onto him, try to anchor him.

But he was already gone, and Wanda was screaming as she felt her entire world slip through her fingers.

He opened his eyes and was blinded by a glowing blue.

His first thought, his first breath, was for Wanda.

* * *

“They had you on ice,” is what Shuri said when he finally calmed down enough to asker her how and why she had gotten a hold of his body two years after Sokovia.

_Two years_. He paled at the lost time. The longest he had ever been apart from his sister was the twelve minutes that made him the older twin. And now… despite T’Challa’s assurances that his sister was alive and well, Pietro was itching to run back to her. She was his mind, his heart, and he was stuck in a laboratory, again, his fingers drumming on his leg impatiently, blurring into silver.

At least he hadn’t lost that, too.

“ On ice?”  
“Apparently, when you died, you weren’t completely dead – while you were in such a comatose state that your body was practically decaying, you still had a shred of consciousness. It’s… difficult to explain.”

That tended to be the case in Wakanda. Shuri was a genius, younger than him, but with a greater wealth of knowledge and technology than Stark, or Strucker, anyone Pietro had ever met. And he was a street rat who hadn’t graduated high school, too determined on keeping him and his better half alive (and keeping Wanda in school) to ever dream of anything like that for himself.

There was some part of Shuri that Pietro didn’t trust. She was tampering with fate, bringing him back from the dead (or, apparently, the almost-dead). She and her magic metal (although she and the others in Wakanda simply called it science, as if it were any less fantastical that way) were too reminiscent of a past of white walls and scalpels and masked faces. Her very nature – her quest for the impossible – put him on edge, not matter how possible things became in Wakanda.

“We will help you find your sister, Pietro.” T’Challa said from where he was reading a hologram over Shuri’s shoulder. Pietro didn’t recognize the letters. Not that he would be able to comprehend them, anyway. He instead focused on the flashing numbers on a screen to the right of them, watching it tick and flicker. T’Challa looked over his shoulder and smirked. “And then maybe you can stop hitting on mine.”

“Hey!” Shuri swatted at him. “Don’t get _catty,_ now.”

T’Challa rolled his eyes, sighing as if dealing with Shuri’s puns was the biggest burden on him in the past 24 hours. “Maybe you should put a stop to your harem of broken white boys, then.”

“Gross!”

There was some part of Shuri that Pietro didn’t trust, but there was a bigger part of her that he understood with a clarity that made his chest hurt. Strucker, and the trash who worked for him, didn’t smile and laugh like Shuri did, full and light. They didn’t swat their brothers’ hands away from prototypes, didn’t show Pietro embarrassing videos of the King of Wakanda, didn’t make bad puns and laugh and say “I’m sorry” with every pinch of a needle.

And so Pietro stayed, and watched the two tease each other, and eventually smiled too.

* * *

 

Barring myths and legends, Shuri and T’Challa were the closest siblings Okoye had ever known. They had been that way since they were very young, according to their mother, who looked over their bickering with a weathered and familiar smile, and Okoye had seen no evidence to make her disbelieve her queen. Even with all the pressure of the world on them – and they were so young, too, the King and the Princess – they stuck by each other. They talked, and laughed, argued and made up.

“Okoye,” T’Challa had breathed once, after an especially long day that had ended with a heated argument between the siblings over their Kimoyo. “You know that Ross wasn’t the first outsider to be brought to Wakanda, yes?”  
“I am aware of the Winter Soldier’s extended stay with the River Tribe.”

“Okoye…” He would always say her name in that long-suffering sigh, whenever he really didn’t want to tell her something.

“My king?” Although she kept her face stoic, her tone commanded honesty. It was a trick that had always worked on poor, pure hearted T’Challa.

“There is another. He was acquired by Wakandan spies in SHIELD and brought into Shuri’s care.”

“Something tells me I would have already been aware of this man if that was the complete story…”

T’Challa was silent for a moment. But Okoye was patient. In this moment, at least. Finally, after a heavy silence fell between the two, he took a deep breath. “He had abilities. Enhanced speed. His body was recovered in Sokovia.”

“His body, my king?” She didn’t like where this was going.

“Twenty-three bullets. He was in a SHIELD facility, being closely monitored and visibly dead. And now my sister believes she can revive him. She says she can save him.”

It was heresy, to put it simply. To take a spirit from the afterlife dare to play as one of the Gods. Shuri had always been one to ignore tradition, to praise innovation and progress unhindered by the status quo. But to take the balance of death into one’s own hands… it was ominous to say the least.

“And you are worried that this will change your sister.” It wasn’t a question. This was a dead man, there was no way there would not be repercussions to this experiment.

“I am worried that she has already changed far more than I can possibly imagined.”

Before the events of the past couple months, Okoye would claim that she had no business butting into this affair. As much as it might concern her, or disgust her, or spit in the face of not only tradition but the delicate line that science dares not cross, her loyalties were strictly to whoever sat on the throne. If T’Challa had demanded her to put a forceful stop to it, she would have.

Now things were different.         

She put a firm hand on his shoulder.

“Do you trust your sister?”

T’Challa took a beat, and Okoye did not want to admit that this moment of silence was terrifying to her.

“With my life.”

In that moment, Okoye simply nodded. But later that night, when she had privilege of private reflection, she smiled to herself.

There were no siblings on this earth closer than T’Challa and Shuri.

* * *

 

Pietro found himself twitching. When he got up to have a walk around the room or to grab a cup of water he would find that he was already there. In the middle of a conversation Shuri would start moving slowly, the world would start moving slowly – impossibly slowly - and Pietro panicked. It only made things worse.

He’d never moved so fast before. He figured it must be some sort of reaction to the vibranium that was used to heal him. Magic, he insisted. It had enhanced his ability. He was afraid to test the limits of his new power (although he had no doubts that he was now much, much faster than a speeding bullet), afraid he might be lost in a world moving too slowly forever should he reach too far.

He went to grab a cup and it shattered in his hand. He didn’t blame the way Shuri and T’Challa seemed to jump back when it happened.

* * *

 

Wanda was used to being on the run. It almost felt like home, the abandoned Hydra warehouse that the Captain had taken them to. It was only temporary, he had said. He had contacts they could trust – contacts that would give them a place to hide.

It had been a long time since she had blamed Stark for anything, she though bitterly to herself as she sat in silence, fuming. It had been a long time since she had felt an anger like this – deep-seated and boiling. After everything she’d been through – after everyone she’d chosen to trust.

There was only one person Wanda ever truly trusted.

And even two years later, when the rest of the world had forgotten, and the name Quicksilver found it’s place in whispers of civilians who knew nothing of loss when they asked “ _Did you hear that Scarlet Witch used to have a partner? He’s easy to miss, but if you pause this clip at the exact right time...”_ Wanda remembered. She kept the picture of their parents – the last piece of proof that Wanda was not the only Maximoff to ever have existed – close to her chest and swore to herself that she would never forget his face, his laugh.

  Wanda hadn’t felt so angry and so alone in a long time. And although every part of her – and a little bit of him – screamed at her that she didn’t deserve this, not this time, Wanda remembered.  She remembered what had happened the last time she had let this kind of anger drive her. The mistakes she had made.

Wanda remembered, and she would never make those mistakes again.

* * *

 

People – news outlets, tech moguls, government officials – were approaching any Wakandan outreach centers that would take their calls. They wanted to speak with the woman in charge. They wanted to speak to the Princess – they’d give anything for an interview, a seminar, even a friendly email.

“Princess Shuri is currently in Wakanda, working on a top-secret project, until further notice. Please understand that she is a very busy woman. Can I take a message or redirect your call?” Employees were trained to say.

* * *

 

When he woke, things came back to him in pieces.

First, there the sound of crisp machinery that he had come to despise. He took a breath in, and the air smelled clean. There was no smoke, no blood. There was the smell of metal, but the air around him was warm, unlike his cell all those years ago

He opened his eyes.

And then immediately closed them. The light was intense in this room, cool and surgical. He blinked away his blindness as he took in his surroundings. The room was filled with technology he’d never had the chance to understand – there were big hologram projections and thin screens displaying numbers and designs he didn’t care to try to comprehend.

“Where-“ Pietro tried to ask, his voice cracking and wilted from disuse. He lurched forward, every bit of him aching, To his right, he heard a screech, and looked over just in time to see a young woman jumping about three feet in the air before turning on her heel to face Pietro.

“Hey! Where do you get off, scaring me like that?” She demanded, pointing her finger at him accusatorily before her expression melted from harsh to amazed. Pietro had seen that look before – on the faces of Hydra scientists, little children, and a certain dopey archer.           

“You-“ she started, and then stopped, and then gaped at him for entirely too long before a wide smile broke out on her face. “I did it! You’re awake!”

She did a little fist pump and she looked so young – she must have still been a teenager.

It wasn’t what Pietro expected to await him in the afterlife, quite frankly.

“Are-“ his voice was still crackly and it reminded  him of Wanda laughing hysterically as his voice cracked for a third time one cold day in Sokovia. He tried hard to not think about it. “Are you an angel?”

She paused in her celebration and stared at him, unblinking, before flushing a bit and breaking eye contact. They were both startled by loud laughter from the direction of the doorway, and turned in unison (or, what would have been unison had Pietro not had his speed), and Pietro took in the form of a man in a suit similar to and yet incredibly unlike any other superhero costume he had ever seen, buckled over and laughing.

“Please,” the newcomer said after regaining his breath, “She is more of a devil than anything else. If you’re going flirt with my sister, you’re going to have to try harder than that.”

They both had an accent he’d never heard before, melodious and quite frankly a relief after all the time he had spent with Americans. The girl scoffed and raised a finger in the direction of her brother, although she refused to make eye-contact with Pietro.

His whole body hurt.

“Flirt? Is this not the afterlife?”

He certainly had not seen this coming.

* * *

 

Wakanda was amazing.

It’s technology outshone anything Pietro had ever seen, and he had spent what felt like all of his youth in a bunker, interacting with magical alien technology, procured from an invasion he trusted Wanda would remember the details of. The Wakandan technology was beyond what Pietro could ever imagine – it had, after all, brought him back from the dead.

It was warm in Wakanda – something that Pietro hadn’t had much experience with living in Sokovia, where there were too many cold nights and not enough hot days. Where he was now, the air was warm, sunshine filtering through the high windows of the room he was eventually moved to. Quarters in the palace.

Wakanda was amazing.

If only Pietro could actually see it. Shuri insisted that he stay in bed – or at the very least in his room. Pietro had tried to make his case – had threatened to escape if he had to. However, as stubborn as he was, Shuri was more so. There was only one person in the world Pietro knew that was more stubborn than her.

His chest hurt.

And then his head hurt. His hands rushed to his head and Pietro himself was startled at the speed. He curled in on himself and let his whole body hurt for a while, a deep pain that was likely just as inexplicable as his very being was.

He felt empty.

* * *

 

Bucky Barnes was a good man, Shuri had decided a while ago. His voice was kind, and his smile – however rare – was genuine, and if the kids in the village bothered him, he didn’t let it show. He was fun to tease – especially when he started to tease her back – and Shuri couldn’t help but wonder how the man before her and the Winter Soldier she read so much about could be the same person.

She had a feeling they never were. Not really.

Sure, Bucky was an outsider, an ex-spy, a murderer, and an all around broken white boy. But she also knew that she could trust him. At first it was simply because T’Challa had trusted him – and after everything that had gone down following the death of their father, she knew how much this meant to her brother. But, after talking to him, and watching him talk to others, she realized that he wasn’t broken so much as just a little cracked around the edges. Nothing a little good old-fashioned glue couldn’t fix.

They had lunches together, every once in a while. T’Challa would normally join them, Okoye following and standing watch at a respectable distance until one of the siblings would say “ _Haven’t we been through enough for this to be casual now?”_ following which she would sit down, too.

The sun was bright around them, as always, and Shuri let herself breath. Although Pietro seemed to be improving, he had begun to seize a couple of days ago and Shuri and her team were working around the clock to try to figure out how to stabilize him. She cursed herself for not spotting his having trouble earlier, when it could have been more easily handled. He had told her it was inevitable, and hadn’t explained any further.

She tried very hard (and failed very hard) to not be frustrated.

T’Challa had finally pushed her out the door, saying he would alert her immediately if anything changed. On one hand she was thankful for her brother. On the other, she wished he would just understand that if she wasn’t working to help Pietro, he could very well die. His body could self-destruct! ( _So will yours, if you keep this up._ )

“I need to contact Steve,” Bucky had told her.

“What can I do to help?”

* * *

 

Before they passed the forcefield, Wanda felt the lives of the people of Wakanda.

There were millions – more than New York – and they were all safe and content.

It took Wanda all her being not to feel jealous. ( _He would have been jealous_ , _bitter, and sarcastic. A place like this would have made him more prickly than anything in the world. It would have made him happier than anywhere else in the world_ ).

“We’re approaching,” the woman piloting the ship – Okoye, Wanda remembers, the strongest fighter in Wakanda and one of T’Challa’s closest friends – warned the others, and seconds later the illusion melted away and they saw everything.

A Utopia, or, at least, it certainly seemed like one to Wanda. Clint squeezed her shoulder and smiled.

“Remember what Bucky said? Something special down there for you?” She didn’t need reminding. Her mind was already spinning with possibilities.

* * *

 

“I have a family, waiting for me at home.” Clint said, apropos of nothing. They had been out in the city, Wanda with a shawl wrapped around her face, Clint wearing a baseball cap low to his. They were sitting at a park, a little out of the way of the public eye, eating sandwiches and watching kids play. “I’m sorry I haven’t told you in all this time.”

“It’s fine, Clint”. And she meant it. She better than most understood the importance of privacy, of secrets. There was a pause. A little girl hugged her younger brother as he came down the slide. “I always did wonder where you were going when you announced your retirement.” 

A little boy showed his mother a worm he had found in the dirt. The mother, for her part, certainly looked interested.

“I met Laura on a mission. It’s a long story for another time. We’ve got a farm upstate. Out of sight, y’know?”

She did.

“Anyway, we have three kids now,” he looked down at his sandwich, lips pursed. “We’re outnumbered.” He said in a quiet voice, chuckling to himself. It was hollow.

“Yeah, Cooper, Lila, and Nathaniel.” He continued, and Wanda let him. “Nate’s about to turn two.”

A teenager walked by, dragged along by a big dog. His music played loud enough in his headphones that even Clint could hear it clearly.

“We, we named him after two of the greatest people I've ever known.” Clint said, uncharacteristically bashful. “Well, we thought he was gonna be a girl, see? So it’s Nathaniel instead of Natasha. And, well.”

The little boy tripped and fell, crying and clutching his knee. His sister ran over and helped him up, inspecting the knee with all the care in the world. Their parents were quick to follow, their father gesticulating wildly and speaking with a loud, dramatic voice while their mother picked the little boy up. In no time he was laughing.

Wanda’s heart ached ( _he was her heart_ ).

“And Pietro. Nathaniel Pietro Barton.”

* * *

 

Finally out of that tiny room, Pietro was going to spend every second of it having the time of his life.

Rather than going to the city, he was brought to a wide and expansive country side. Before Shuri could even finish warning him not to push himself, he had left them in the dust.

Running had never felt so amazing, Pietro felt the wind in his hair and the sun on his back as he ran wide circles around Shuri, T’Challa, and their entourage. He ran back to them and savored the looks on their faces when he screeched to a stop. Even Okoye, normally stoic and dry, looked at a loss for words.

“When you said you were fast…” Shuri started, eyes wide and teary from the wind.

“We didn’t think…”

“Oh come on!” Pietro laughed, cocky and sharp and finally free. “You’ve seen flying metal men, my sister control the world with her mind, gods from fairytales, and you yourselves brought me back from the dead!” He ran another quick lap in a heartbeat. He had never been this fast before. “You can’t tell me you didn’t see this coming!” 

* * *

 

_He has family out there._

It’s a thought that haunted T’Challa. It was made worse when he found out just who that family was.

Pietro had only been awake for a week or so – he could still barely get out of bed without falling from pain – and yet every opportunity he had he tried to cajole T’Challa into helping him get out – out of the medical wing, out of Wakanda – all to find his sister.

“You might have seen her in the news,” He said, speculatively. “She might have decided to go out on her own, but I know Wanda. She needs people – she cannot be alone. The codename she likely uses is Scarlet Witch. Have you heard of her?”

He had. She had been there, at the airport. She had been one of the ones arrested, sent away. It broke his heart to keep it a secret, but T’Challa was right to fear what Pietro might do to him and his sister – what Pietro might do to himself – if he was unable to cope with the news.

Shuri broke the story. She could never keep her mouth shut.

* * *

“You!”

Bucky turned to the sound of the voice. It wasn’t one he recognized. Shuri stopped in her path to, as she had been leading him to the tech room where he could make the call to Steve. With the approval of the King, of course, the fugitive Avengers would find sanctuary in Wakanda, just as he had.

And, apparently, this light-haired stranger.

It took him a second to realize that no, this man was not a stranger. It was Quicksilver – one of the twin experiments that the Winter Soldier had only ever gotten a glimpse of. His sister, the Scarlet Witch, he was a quite a bit more familiar with. Didn’t Quicksilver die?

“You two know each other?” Shuri asked. Her face softened into a concerned frown as Quicksilver shook and blurred into silver for a while, a twitch reminiscent of when the Winter Soldier had gotten a good look at the twins in their early days with Hydra.

“We used to work together.” Bucky said, and immediately she understood, nodding curtly. Quicksilver scoffed from the bed.

“What, she fixed you up real good too?”

“No offense buddy, but you look a little worse for wear, there.”

Pietro tried to flip a finger his way. It didn’t work as well as he hoped it might, seeing as he was handcuffed to the bed.

* * *

 

Shuri tried not to get too excited when the ship touched down. She stood to T’Challa’s left, with their mother at his right, and tried to compose herself as she watched the bay door open and Okoye lead their guests forward.

She shouldn’t be here. Pietro was getting worse – getting so much worse. It had been so bad today, she was counting the minutes when he _wasn’t_ jerking around, silver and seizing and dangerous. He tried to tell her he was alright, but his breathing was labored, and it didn’t take a genius to tell how tired he was.

And now, when she was running out of options, the only person who could help was only three feet away.

She was beautiful. Shoulder to shoulder with Clint Barton, her head held high but the awe of the city  clear in her eyes.

Screw tradition. Shuri was never known for caring about it anyway. She ran forward, ignoring her mother’s indignant call for her, and grabbed the woman who could be no other than Wanda Maximoff’s hand. Wanda startled, scarlet ribbons falling from her fingers and lingering in the air around her. She was dangerous – unbelievably dangerous – but Shuri was too excited to care.

She was already dragging her away, leaving T’Challa and their mother to explain.

* * *

 

“I am T’Challa’s sister, call me Shuri” Her words were rushed and breathless and Wanda was having a hard time following as she continued to be pulled into the castle. “I’m sorry but we cannot wait, Pietro is unwell, and I believe that if anything could help him, it would be-“

“What?!” Wanda only just barely caught Pietro’s name. Despite having lived in the United Stated for two years, English was still her second language and it was clearly also Shuri’s. “What about my brother?”

By this point Shuri had pulled her to a doorway that looked inconspicuous enough. The door slid open silently – tech that Wanda made sure she would marvel over later once she got a decent explanation of the situation, and why the Princess was bringing up her dead brother of all things –

There was a blur of silver, and Wanda felt herself being picked up, practically thrown across the room. She would have met an unfortunate fate with the wall of the hallway, had – whatever it was, it all happened too quickly to comprehend – the mass that had tackled her not turned them around at the last moment to take the blunt of the blow.

Hands cupping her waist and neck were shaking. Distantly, Wanda heard an unfamiliar voice apologize “ _I had just undone the cuffs for a second – they were proving a great discomfort”._ The hands were shaking, blurring.

Wanda looked up, but she had already felt it. Felt that silver reach out and find its place in the arms of the scarlet in their minds. She couldn’t believe it, though, she couldn’t believe it and all she had to do was look up.

And he looked terrible. There were dark circles under his eyes, his hair was oily and unkept, and he gave her a wild and desperate look that brought back memories she wished she could forget.

He looked absolutely terrible.

But she had never been more happy to see anything or anyone else in her entire life.

              

              

 


End file.
